Liam Day asks whether athletes have an obligation to entertain.
We sat watching the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, during which the San Antonio Spurs exploited the absence of LeBron James and dissected the Heat defense for 37 points, missing only two of the 16 shots they took, a display of not only basketball at its finest, but of the Spurs’ quintessence, what has made them the consistently best team in the league for 15 years.
My friend’s response? “Eh, I just can’t get into them. They’re boring.”
As a former player and coach, one who appreciates the game less for the dunks than for the swing of the ball on offense or an effective hedge on defense, I was appalled.
But I had to check myself. Had I not written something to the same effect about professional golf just a couple of months ago? About how boring the sport had become in part because of the technical proficiency of its tour members? Was I not a hypocrite?
I’d like to defend myself simply by paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” But to do so would be a cop out. Not least because, as my friend and I discussed at the bar the other night, the debate is over a question even more fundamental than simply whether as a fan it was right to punish a team for being too good.
A fundamental tension exists at the heart of professional sports, which are both competition and product. Unlike with most businesses, in professional sports mission and profit don’t necessarily align. . . Offense generates ticket sales and ratings, but defense wins championships.
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The questions we must answer are why we watch sports in the first place and, its corollary, what can be said to constitute a player’s job. Is a player’s responsibility, and only responsibility, to win? Or is there an underlying obligation to entertain? If the San Antonio Spurs win the NBA Finals by beating the Heat in defensive-minded, grind-it-out fashion, keeping the scores of every game in the 60s, would they be beyond criticism simply because they had won the NBA Championship?
I doubt you would hear many writers call out coach Gregg Popovich if he employed such a strategy successfully, but there would most certainly be columns expressing concern about the state of the game and I can assure you that new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver would be pulling his hair out if he had any.
A fundamental tension exists at the heart of professional sports, which are both competition and product. Unlike with most businesses, in professional sports mission and profit don’t necessarily align. The Phoenix Suns circa 2007 are a perfect example. Perhaps no team in the NBA has been as much fun to watch as those Suns teams, at least since the hey day of Showtime in L.A. back in the 80s. Yet, for all the fast breaks and all of Steve Nash’s acrobatics with the basketball, the Suns never made it to the NBA Finals, never mind won it. Sure, they were pretty much screwed by a corrupt referee, but the bigger obstacle to the team’s success was always its lackluster defense. Offense generates ticket sales and ratings, but defense wins championships.
This is not a purely theoretical discussion. It is, in fact, one that the NBA had 20 years ago. During the 90s, particularly during Michael Jordan’s interregnum, the quality of offensive play in the league declined. In 1994, the New York Knicks were able to grind their way to the NBA Finals playing some of the ugliest basketball in the history of the game. Rampant hand-checking had given a decided advantage to the defense, and shooting percentages and the average scores of games plummeted. There was considerable hand-wringing and, ultimately, some rule changes were instituted in an effort to increase offensive output.
David Stern was, as much as anyone, attuned to the tensions between the goals of individual players and teams, and the final product they generated. It is the reason he levied a $250,000 fine on the Spurs last year when Popovich chose to play against the Heat in the final game of a road trip without Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, whom he sent home early to rest, At the time I lambasted the outgoing commissioner for punishing a team and a coach who made a decision they believed to be in their best long-term interests. His argument was, essentially, that theater goers who pay two hundred dollars a pop to see, say, Denzel Washington in A Raisin in the Sun are rightly disappointed when they arrive the night of the show only to discover that Denzel’s understudy is going on in his place.
Not everyone who watches basketball is an aficionado. Adam Silver can’t market the NBA exclusively to those with an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for its finer aspects. If he wants to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and ensure a global market for his league, he needs to sell it to the widest possible audience.
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The question, as I wrote then, is where do you draw the line. If the rights of fans to be entertained for the good money they shell out are infringed when a team’s stars don’t play, are they not also infringed if a star plays just 24 minutes instead of 36? “Cramps be damned. I paid my money; LeBron damn well better get his ass in there.”
With full recognition of the tension described above, we return to the question of the Spurs efficiency. Is it truly boring? Personally, I don’t think so. I don’t think even my friend would claim the 2014 Spurs in any way resemble the 1994 New York Knicks. They move the ball beautifully on offense and shoot the “3”. As a basketball aficionado, I love watching them play. But therein may lie part of the problem. Not everyone who watches basketball is an aficionado. Adam Silver can’t market the NBA exclusively to those with an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for its finer aspects. If he wants to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and ensure a global market for his league, he needs to sell it to the widest possible audience.
The conundrum puts me in mind of a documentary a few years back about the heavy metal band, Anvil, which is recognized as one of those bands that, like The Replacements, is more popular with other musicians than it is with the casual fan. 20 years after the death of heavy metal Anvil was still out there producing records, though no one was buying them and the band members were having to work in a school cafeteria to support themselves. The questions the documentary raises include to what end does art lead and can an artist be said to be great if no one can or is willing to follow him or her to a level of artistry that the casual observer, who may lack formal training, can’t fully appreciate?
Of course, a lot of artists would probably tell you that pandering to an audience is beneath them, but I suspect most of those artists work in a medium that is heavily subsidized. Greatness in art isn’t truly attainable through disdain for one’s audience. It most often arises when an artist attempts to stretch an accepted form or genre to meet his or her individual vision. Give the audience enough of what they expect so that you can say what you want.
At this point, unlike our discussion above of the problems generated by defensive-minded play in the 1990s, clearly we’ve veered into the theoretical. The question of whether one believes the San Antonio Spurs are boring is one whose answer is a cliché: it lies in the eye of the beholder. The question becomes then whether the NBA, if it does believe the Spurs’ “boring” style of play endangers future ticket sales and television ratings, can or should have the right to influence the Spurs to play a different style of basketball. In other words, should the league be able to force the Spurs to become more exciting?
The question is not as ridiculous as it may seem at first. The decision to fine the Spurs last year was an imposition by the league on the internal operations of a member franchise. What’s to say that it won’t be the last or even the least intrusive?
Perhaps a more telling, and interesting, example is to be found in another sport, MMA, where Jon Jones has so dominated the light heavyweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship that it poses a serious problem for series’ promoter, Dana White. The only fighter who has come close to beating Jones is Alexander Gustafsson, which is why White was so desperate to get Jones to sign a contract for a rematch.
When one is that much better than the competition, the competition becomes boring, especially when, as in Jones’s case, it is the marriage of technical skill with superior athleticism that makes him great. This is no Mike Tyson-like idiot savant, whose sheer ferociousness in the ring first intimidates and then overwhelms his foes. Jones is a consummate fighter whose recognition of his own greatness tends to grate challengers and fans alike.
Jon Jones needs to listen to the advice of another promoter, Oliver Reed’s Proximo in Gladiator: “I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me.”
This perhaps then is the challenge for Adam Silver in the Proximo role. Individual greatness in the NBA Finals lies on one side, but we all know just how popular LeBron James, whose own arrogance, like Jones’s, tends to grate, really is. To the other lies the team play and technical proficiency that would seem to bore the casual fan, or at least the casual fan as represented by my friend.
Personally, I am rooting for the Spurs. Though I have been a defender of James in the past, and the second half display he put on in Game 2 was a thing of beauty, I just love how the Spurs play the game. But, then again, I am something more than a casual fan.
Photo: AP/Darren Abate
It’s not so much that the Spurs are boring. I’m actually a big proponent of the team style of basketball that they play. They do a lot of things well, including shutting down their opponents with an absolutely merciless defense. That’s why it takes a special game by the best player in the world to beat them. Winning as a team rather than as a group of individuals isn’t boring. It’s just that the Spurs don’t look like they’re having any fun while they’re doing it. From their curmudgeon of a coach down to that big guy at the end… Read more »
I do not watch sport to be ‘entertained’. I’m ‘entertained’ by watching my team compete to win. Hit the ball, make the shot, catch the pass … THIS is what I want to see.
And when I watch a TEAM sport, I want to see them play as a TEAM. You know, ‘all-for-one-and-one-for-all’ and all that?
WUNJO